Knowledge and Action

We live in exciting times. There are massively successful and influential people who, over the centuries, have condensed their life’s work into books which we can devour in less than a week. Or, better yet, we can go online and find exactly what we are looking for. This enables us to acquire incredible amounts of knowledge in a relatively short time. Better yet, you don’t have to attend a fancy school or university to acquire this knowledge. If you have access to a computer with an internet connection, it’s all at your fingertips. There are no excuses.

But….but…what if you can’t actually read? Well, you can access that knowledge through the increasing number of audiobooks, podcasts or instructional videos on Youtube. OK, but…what if you’re blind? Thankfully, a great number of texts are available in Braille. You get the idea. The information that we really need to be able to change our lives, and the lessons to be learned from the knowledge and wisdom of those who came before us, is available to almost everybody. So, in a day and age where we all fight to stand out from the crowd, it’s clear that access to these sources of knowledge and information is not what makes us unique.

What makes us unique is not that we think in a particularly original way either. Our uniqueness comes from the way in which we absorb and understand the existing knowledge and ideas, before reacting to it in our own individual way. It’s in taking existing knowledge and ideas and challenging them, or improving upon them, that we become unique and original ourselves.

Set your ego and your fears aside, and open yourself up to change. Now, put that knowledge which you’ve acquired so far into action. Act and learn. Discard the elements which don’t work, make adjustments and tweaks wherever you feel necessary and do more of what works. This is how you can actually improve your life, by acting on the knowledge which you acquire and learning from it. Or, would you rather make it to 60 years of age and look back with regret at a life full of unfulfilled potential, in which you had the knowledge with which to make your mark on the world, but instead did nothing with it? The choice, for me at least, is an obvious one. After all, knowledge is useless unless you do something with it.

If you are not using the knowledge which you acquire, why are you even bothering to read?!